On the Desiderata for Online Altruism: Nudging for Equitable Donations

Online donation platforms help equalize access to opportunity and funding in cases where inequalities exist. In the context of public school education in the USA, for instance, financial inequalities have been shown to perpetuate in the educational system, where schools are primarily funded through local property taxes. In response, private charitable donation platforms such as DonorsChoose.org have emerged seeking to alleviate systemic inequity. But how effective are these platforms today in redressing existing funding inequalities across school districts? Our analysis over extensive donation data from DonorsChoose shows that such platforms are ineffective to mitigate (and may exacerbate) existing inequalities. In this paper, we explore the role of online educational charities in directing more funding towards poorer schools, without seemingly compromising their donors' freedom of choice in how they donate their private money. This question leads us to draw on the line of work on choice architectures in behavioral economics, and pose a novel research question on the impact of interface design on equity in socio-technical systems. Through controlled experiments, we demonstrate how simple interface design interventions, such as modifying default rankings or displaying additional information about the schools, might lead to changes in the donation distributions, which may help platforms direct funding towards schools in need. Going beyond educational charities, we hope that our work will bring into notice the role of platform designs for the social requirements of online altruism.